I was struck by these two paragraphs in the article:
Mr Black, who runs a freight brokering company called Freight Rate Central in Sarasota, Florida, is part of an invisible army of professionals who coordinate and marshal the fleets of trucks that criss-cross the country, carrying everything from chickens to smartphones. For this job, Bokksu would pay him about US$13,000.
Mr Black got to it. He posted the job on a trucking board that is something like a Craigslist for freight. Someone named Tristan with HCH Trucking accepted the job (though he was using a Gmail account), and said he would have the shipment picked up shortly.
Mr. Black here apparently doesn't have an app to connect him to legitimate truckers, instead he relies on a "job board kind of like Craigslist". My assumption was that the availability of a better executed LTL freight logistics company would put people like Mr. Black out of business. So maybe the real challenge here is connecting those better companies with people like Mr. Taing?
Of course given the way the article ends up it is entirely possible that Mr. Taing is the bad guy here.
The market is very competitive- capacity can get tight, which makes room for the “little guy” to grab a load. Even at the biggest companies with millions of lines of software, tons of logistics is still driven by email.
Job boards are big business. They act like a 4th party logistics company, where they aggregate the available loads from multiple 3rd party logistics companies. But there’s plenty of these aggregation site that, as mentioned operate a lot more like Craigslist.
More sophisticated systems are like the stock market, automated systems booking loads within one second after becoming available.
In every industry there are fly by night hucksters that take business from people who have no experience procuring services and don't know how to find legitimate companies. Mr Black seems like one of these. Imagine risking 100k on a craiglist driver, I don't blame Mr Black, he has his business model and customers who take th risk on him, but surely the candy company would spend more time doing due diligence of vendors and insurance when it involves a 100k shipment. A lesson learnt I suppose
A commenter on the thread mentioned that Apple once tried to one-day-ship them a laptop via Uber Eats and the driver vanished with the laptop. Apps don’t magically make things better.
Mr Black, who runs a freight brokering company called Freight Rate Central in Sarasota, Florida, is part of an invisible army of professionals who coordinate and marshal the fleets of trucks that criss-cross the country, carrying everything from chickens to smartphones. For this job, Bokksu would pay him about US$13,000.
Mr Black got to it. He posted the job on a trucking board that is something like a Craigslist for freight. Someone named Tristan with HCH Trucking accepted the job (though he was using a Gmail account), and said he would have the shipment picked up shortly.
Mr. Black here apparently doesn't have an app to connect him to legitimate truckers, instead he relies on a "job board kind of like Craigslist". My assumption was that the availability of a better executed LTL freight logistics company would put people like Mr. Black out of business. So maybe the real challenge here is connecting those better companies with people like Mr. Taing?
Of course given the way the article ends up it is entirely possible that Mr. Taing is the bad guy here.